Vitalik Buterin appeals to Twitter founder for help against Ethereum scams

Have you ever thought about why banks get robbed? The simplest answer is, that’s where the money is! So it goes to prove that, “where there is money, there is crime!” The same applies to the scams in the cryptocurrency world because these digital coins are also money! Ever since cryptocurrencies were introduced into our world, the crimes involving money have risen drastically. The CEO of Tesla, Elon Musk recently posted about Ethereum scambots on Twitter.

And social media is no help whatsoever because the majority of these scammers or scambots operate through them. This news comes just after William Shatner pointed out a scammer on Twitter impersonating him. These scambots have been clogging the microblogging site and they always impersonate celebrities.

The scammers mainly target big names in the cryptocurrency industry. Some of them who are being impersonated are Litecoin’s Charlie Lee, Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin and Binance exchange’s Changpeng Zhao. These so-called “token giveaway” schemes can generally be found right under the celebrity’s tweet. The only way to identify them is by their twitter handle. But sometimes, this proves to be difficult too as the scammers choose a handle that closely resembles the original one. In fact, Vitalik Buterin has changed his Twitter user-name to “Vitalik “Not giving away ETH” Buterin”.

Most of these Ethereum scambots work similarly. They comment about the “bona fide” Ethereum giveaways or airdrops to the account holders. The Ponzi scheme’s website asks interested people to send around 0.5 to 20 Ethereum to verify their address. These pump and dump scheme promise that people will receive huge amounts of Ethereum in return.

They don’t just stop at this, the scambots have alternate accounts claiming to have received varying amounts of ETH. The number of scambots on Twitter is overwhelming the microblogging site. On July 9th, Elon Musk tweeted saying,

“I want to know who is running the Etherium scambots! Mad skillz …”

The founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin instantly replied to Elon Musk’s tweet. He expressed disappointment that the Tesla CEO spoke about the scambots instead of Ethereum’s technology. Buterin also appealed to the founder of Twitter, Jack Dorsey to help with the scambots. He further requested the ETH community to develop a solution with layer 2 filtering to weed out the scams.

I do wish @elonmusk‘s first tweet about ethereum was about the tech rather than the twitter scambots……..@jack help us please? Or someone from the ETH community make a layer 2 scam filtering solution, please? https://t.co/biVRshZmne

These scambots posts on Twitter are considered a “minor nuisance” among the cryptocurrency community. Most of the crypto community blame the victim itself for getting roped into this scheme, which is fairly obvious. But it could elevate, especially if it gets more convincing. The industry needs to take steps to filter out these scambots or situation could aggravate leading to more confusion.

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Last Update: May 25, 2018

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